Gas monitoring systems are used in industrial facilities to protect people and property from various environmental conditions, such as toxic gas exposure, oxygen asphyxiation, and risk of explosion. In general, gas monitoring systems operate to alleviate such risks by detecting concentrations of certain gases and providing alerts for dangerous conditions in sufficient time to allow individuals to take precautions. Conventional gas detection may be performed using various techniques, including via “fixed” monitors mounted to permanent structures or by “portable” monitors worn or carried by an individual.
The performance of gas monitoring devices may be measured based on the accuracy (or reliability) and the speed of the device. Accuracy is a measure that generally indicates how similar a gas concentration detected by a device is to the actual concentration of the gas in the environment. The speed of a device relates to the time required for the device to react to a change in concentration of a target gas. In a conventional gas monitoring device, speed may be measured in terms of the time required to detect a given percentage of the actual gas concentration. Standard benchmark measurements for speed include “T50” and “T90,” which refer to the time required for a gas monitoring device to measure 50% and 90%, respectively, of the actual gas concentration.
Speed is a significant characteristic of any gas monitoring device because affected personnel need to become aware as soon as possible to changing environmental conditions. Improvements in the response times of conventional gas detection hardware, such as sensors and device circuitry, are limited without markedly increasing the cost and/or size of the devices. As such, increasing the speed of a device via hardware is not a realistic option for most gas monitoring device users. Accordingly, gas monitoring devices would benefit from technology that improved the speed of the device through enhancements to techniques for processing gas sensor information to produce a gas measurement output.